


Between Ghosts

by umadoshi (Ysabet)



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Adopted Sibling Incest, Canon Disabled Character, Community: hc_bingo, F/M, POV First Person, Series Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ysabet/pseuds/umadoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which healing starts slowly, dreams keep old wounds fresh, and the fact that there's no such thing as ghosts doesn't make being haunted any easier.</p><p>Set in more than one book in the trilogy, hence the vague summary. <b>Full-series spoilers.</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Filling the "therapy" square on my hc_bingo card (on Dreamwidth).
> 
> Additional semi-spoilery warnings are in the end notes.

**August 2041**

The worst thing about nightmares is when they stick to you, when you know you're awake but can't figure out what's reality and what's lingering from the dreams. Waking up in the mornings was already hard, because my grip on reality hasn't exactly been solid for a long time now, and two weeks of the new status quo--two weeks of George being there in the flesh again--wasn't nearly enough time to keep me from being confused for a while every time I woke up.

It was exponentially worse with nightmares. I kept jolting awake with my head full of shit I never wanted to remember--not every night, but often enough--and George kept hugging me as soon as she woke up enough to realize what was going on. That was better than when she backed off to give me space, which we'd tried a couple of times, but it still meant I was half dreaming and feeling her arms around me. It meant I freaked out because she felt so real and I never wanted her to let go again, but if she felt _that_ real it had to mean I'd finally snapped entirely, and I still had too much I needed to do.

"Can you tell me?" she'd ask when I calmed down, and mostly I couldn't. It was too fragmented and slippery.

The first time I said "yes", I felt her tense up. She had me right up against her, and everything--my breathing, my pulse, the shaking that wouldn't stop--told her how bad the dream had been.

 _She doesn't want to know._ The thought that surfaced was in her voice, grim and angry and protective. But it wasn't _me_ that voice in my head was protecting anymore. _She can't do it, Shaun. Maybe she wants to, but you know she can't. You **know** they put her together wrong. She can't do what I can do. She can't ever understand you the way I can._

"Were you remembering something?" George asked, feeling me hesitate.

"Yeah," I said.

Her lips were soft as a dream--the good kind, the kind that had been scaring me shitless for so long because I never wanted them to end--when she kissed my cheek. "Tell me." Her voice lightened, and it helped, even though I knew she was forcing it to try to relax me. "Pretend I'm your therapist or something."

I actually laughed, although not for the reason she might've been hoping for. "Yeah, about that. Funny thing."

I took a deep breath, and I told her.

**********

**September 2040**

I don't know much about psychiatry, but I've always kind of had the impression that a lot of the advice shrinks dole out is on the flaky side: Love yourself. Talk about your feelings. Dig into all the reasons you feel like your parents never loved you. Talk more about your feelings, your feelings, your fucking feelings until you've drained that well dry as a bone.

Not exactly my style, and not something I'd ever wanted to explore, but a couple months after George's death and after a lot of haranguing by pretty much everyone who knew me, I caved and went to find myself a psychiatrist. I interviewed a bunch--I'm sure they thought _they_ were interviewing _me_ , but even if that kind of thing was never my journalistic specialty, I had enough experience to keep up with them--and picked the least touchy-feely shrink I could find.

I was pretty comfortable talking about the fact that I was grieving. Anyone would be grieving, right? I'd loved George more than anything else in the world, and I'd been the one who shot her. It had to be safe to admit that losing her had shattered me; she'd been my best friend, my sister, my rock. I'd called her my twin more times than I can count, and it had been true enough that she'd always let it stand.

With all of that at my disposal during sessions, it felt almost like a white lie to not mention what else my almost-twin had been to me. I could even _say_ that George and I had given each other everything, always, and how was it my fault if I said that to someone and they didn't do the math?

What I couldn't hide was that George talked to me. She'd been voicing her opinion and offering her help since the day she died, loving me and taking me to task as readily as she always had, because why wouldn't she? Hadn't we always been two halves of one whole, GeorgiaandShaun, ShaunandGeorgia?

"Have you tried not answering her?" my shrink asked during the third session.

"No." I wanted to say _Why would I do that?_ , but I wasn't crazy enough not to understand, and not quite crazy enough to wish I didn't.

"Maybe you should try," he said. "If you don't acknowledge her, you might be able to start reclaiming your mind."

"Don't talk to the voice in my head and I'll go sane again?" I asked. "You think it's that simple?"

"I think it's a start. And if you'd like, there's always the option of prescribing anti-psychotics."

I opted against the drugs, but the advice seemed reasonable. I listened to his description of what I might expect, including the fact that sometimes ignoring voices resulted in them turning nasty, even harmful. "She wouldn't," I said, and he nodded.

"You know your sister wanted only the best for you, Shaun. So if what you're hearing starts _not_ wanting what's best, hopefully you'll understand that it's not real."

"I already know she's not really there." But that didn't seem to make much difference, not when I still acted as if she were.

"What do you think?" I asked her when we were home.

Her reply was uncharacteristically gentle. _I think you should do whatever gives you the best chance at living a good life._ It was exactly the same tone she'd always used on the rare occasions when some animal part of my brain sat up and noticed that I played with walking corpses for a living and freaked out on me.

"It'd be easier to ignore you if you weren't talking to me," I said, and George laughed sadly.

_I've never been able to not talk to you any more than you've been able to not talk to me. But if you think that's what you need to do, then try. I love you no matter what, Shaun._

So I tried. And George, to her credit, tried too. I could feel her in the back of my head, silent, trying so hard to do this thing that might help me.

It didn't mean she never spoke. When I needed her advice--and her dying hadn't changed how badly I needed that--she offered it, and then she said she was sorry, and all I wanted was to hold her and kiss her until that wistful, pained determination went out of her voice. All I _could_ do was answer and tell her it was fine.

I could, but I didn't. Because that was the whole point, right? So George was miserable and I was wretched and we were both so fucking lonely even though she was _in my head_. It was pure hell.

Before then, I would've sworn there was no way for my dreams to get worse. I'd been dreaming about her broken body, about her blood everywhere but safe under her skin, since she'd died. In my dreams her blood was all over me, the way it should have been then: coating my skin, in my eyes, in my mouth, deeper inside me than I'd ever been inside her.

Now I found myself dreaming that I'd shot her and she hadn't died, that she'd screamed and screamed and I'd held her because I had to, because George was screaming and I _had to_. I dreamed about her eyes when she realized I'd been infected from holding her, that what she'd once said was her worst nightmare--that I'd amplify without her being able to spare me--was going to come true.

No wonder I woke up retching and sobbing. No wonder George was terrified in my head, so scared that I was hurting myself. I _was_ hurting myself, and her along with me.

No wonder that she stopped trying not to talk to me, five days in. No wonder, when I was sitting on our--my--bedroom floor with her loaded .40 in my hands, hardly breathing because the only thing I could think of was how good it would be to spatter my own blood and brains over the walls, to make my own meaningless Rorschach test to complement the one I'd made out of hers.

I wanted it like I'd never wanted anything but her in my life. And I could ignore her trying to reason with me, could ignore her yelling at me, because if I just pulled one more trigger I'd either never hear anything again or I'd be wherever she was, and she could yell to her heart's content.

But I couldn't ignore her screaming, or how she started crying, a sound as wrenching as it was unfamiliar. I couldn't ignore the despair in her voice when she finally whispered _You're going to use my gun? **My** gun?_ , sounding every bit as destroyed as I'd felt for so long.

I couldn't ignore that Georgia loved me and wanted me to live, and I couldn't live without talking to her. So that was the end of that little experiment.

**********

**August 2041**

After I finished talking, George didn't say anything for a while--either of her. The version of her in my head had been saying less and less lately, which was good, since she'd also been sounding less and less like _her_ , but for the moment I could pretty much hear my sister thinking in stereo, and I sure as fuck didn't want to be the one to interrupt. I dropped my head back into the comfort of the pillow and waited for someone else to break the silence.

Eventually the George beside me on the bed--the one with the body, the one who really had George's mind and memories instead of my meticulous recreation--rolled onto her side, studying me. She'd turned a lamp on sometime during my explanation, and I hadn't even noticed. "I don't know what to make of it, but she kept you alive," she said. "Mahir told me he wouldn't have been surprised to find out you were actually being haunted, not crazy, and he didn't seem to think it was weird to say that to my face." There was something heartbreaking in the way she laughed. "And I don't think I care which it is. Whatever happened inside your head, it kept you _alive_."

She moved up against me, sliding an arm under my head and pulling me to her. Cradling me, her mouth pressed to my ear, she said, "Thank you," her voice going husky. She obviously wasn't talking to me, which added yet another item to the list of "things in my life that should be creepy as hell and aren't".

"Thank you," she repeated, tightening her grip all around me as if it'd make her stop shaking. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," over and over again. It took me a second to process what the wetness seeping through my hair was, and my heart turned over when I clued in. She was holding on too tightly for me to really move, but I squeezed back as best I could while she--my impossible, tough as nails, fierce Georgia, who'd never been able to cry--started sobbing in my ear as if she were falling apart.

It should have felt weird. I'd just spent over a year trying to figure out how to react to things I'd never had to before, and it seemed like a disproportionate number of them had involved people--even people I cared about, in my numb way--needing some kind of emotional response I didn't have a fucking clue how to give. Maybe I'd been faking it even more than I'd realized back when George was alive and I was the one fielding hugs and handshakes when they got thrown at us. Or maybe once I didn't have her anymore I'd just lost that ability to cope so thoroughly that I couldn't even remember what it had felt like, or that I'd had it at all.

Having George honest-to-God crying on me, not just tearing up the way she had been sometimes--which usually seemed to confuse and irritate her more than anything else, as if it were nothing but some freakish inconvenience that her eyes had started leaking--only made me determinedly wriggle one arm loose from her stranglehold so I could get it around her, adding all of my strength to hers to help keep us as close together as humanly possible.

I spent most of my life sure I wanted to die in the field, in a way that could be as excruciating as it wanted as long as it was equally memorable. After George was gone, I stopped caring about the "how" so much as the "how soon". Now? Now all I wanted was to be this close to her when we died someday, and I wanted that day to not come for a long, long time.

"It's okay," I told her, because it _was_ okay: we were alive, and we were together. That didn't mean I didn't know exactly how she felt; it took horrifyingly little imagination to know how it would have destroyed her to wake up in that lab and realize I had died without her.

Before, I'd always managed to convince myself that after my inevitable death, George would mourn and get on with her life. After her death I'd gone through her files, all the unpublished writing she'd willed to me without ever believing I'd read it, and found the one secret she'd kept from me. She'd hidden it from me in plain sight, laughing it off when I worried about how she'd handle losing me--and her dismissal had been true, because everything George said was true. I _didn't_ need to be afraid that grief would drive her to suicide before her mind cleared. She'd quietly made that decision years ago and had been about as at peace with it as it was possible to be.

I know why she didn't tell me. Even while I was reading her files, I knew. She'd spent our lives adamant that she would never, never do anything to keep me from doing what made me happy, any more than I would've stopped her from doing what brought her joy.

There was just one small difference: George doing what she loved meant that sometimes I was a little frustrated by how much she defined herself by her work, when she was so much more than that. Me doing what I loved meant she'd spent _years_ intending to die alone, probably in a tub full of water and her own blood.

Finding that out after she was already dead had been one of the most sickening moments of my life. It also, in a fucked-up way, gave me the only glimmer of comfort I had about her death: she _hadn't_ died alone. She'd died with me right there telling her I loved her, knowing I'd be with her until the very end.

Now that I had her back, there were no words for how it felt to imagine what she'd been planning. But so far, I couldn't see much point in bringing it up. Sure, I could apologize and tell her how awful I felt about how fucking selfish I'd been, and maybe make her feel like she needed to justify her decision or reassure me. Or I could _not_ throw all of that at her, and opt to concentrate on making sure she'd never be in a position to make that choice a reality.

And for the moment, what I could do was hold her while she cried. "I've got you, George," I said, trying to keep my voice steady for her. "I've got you. I'm right here. We're okay."

 _It wasn't for her,_ her voice said, half in my head and half in my ear. I shut my eyes fast to keep from looking around to see if she'd turned visible. Back when I'd first started seeing her, it had always been when I was under severe stress, when my world was in the process of falling apart dramatically instead of crumbling bit by bit, but by the time we went to Seattle she'd been manifesting whenever she felt like it, just because I'd wanted her there so badly.

"I know," I said, because despite everything, I still couldn't always ignore her. In my arms, George went still, listening. _That_ response was high on the list of "things that are fucked up even given the situation": the version of my dead sister who'd been created for me knew how to tell when I was talking to the version of her I'd created for myself.

I knew she knew when I was talking to _her_ , too, but I kissed her neck anyway, making sure. "She stopped trying to keep me alive when you came back."

George shifted uncomfortably at my phrasing; the part of her brain that never shuts off or gives her a minute's peace wouldn't quite let her accept "came back", and I think maybe it never will.

 _I **tried** to keep you from having to live with knowing you left Becks to die alone,_ her voice murmured, entirely in my head now, meaning it was safe to open my eyes.

"I know," George said. Her breathing was still off-kilter, but she'd stopped crying. "But I'm not going to stop being grateful, no matter what she says now." She rubbed at her eyes--too hard, making me wince--and gave me a level, if red-rimmed, look.

"You're being defiant at a voice in my head."

"I'm being firm with a part of you that's being difficult," she shot back. We both ignored the tremor in her voice.

"Okay," I said. "Fair enough."

She let me kiss the tear tracks on her face, which weirdly helped calm us both down--"weirdly" since it was a new thing for both of us, but somehow felt natural--and then she kissed me on the mouth, tasting her own tears. "Can you get back to sleep?" she asked.

"I think so, yeah. You?"

"I don't know," she said, with typical blunt honesty. "But even if I can't, I'll feel better if you're getting some rest. Try, all right?"

I studied her, reading the earnestness in her still-strange brown eyes. My hallucination of her had always had eyes that color, but the reality wasn't exactly what I'd imagined. The hallucination had cried, but she still hadn't blinked much, and she hadn't had that trace of uncertainty, of not _knowing_ what emotions she was revealing. George, on the other hand, kept reaching for the opacity she was never going to have again--except when we were alone. With me, it went the other way, like she was afraid of not being transparent enough.

"Okay," I said again, and she relaxed minutely, relieved to have conveyed what she wanted to.

I kissed her one more time and fell asleep again almost before I knew it. If there was blood in my dreams, I didn't remember it in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: suicidal ideation.


End file.
